Steve,
I truly enjoyed your post. As a NASA follower I find these topics very interesting and I love to find posts like yours. Looking forward to your future posts to know more details about the components of ARISSat.
-Susan

I hope that the satellite will work well enough to encourage others to launch others in the future. The idea is really exciting and it is a shame that the antenna was broken. I wonder what more can be done to augment the broken antenna?

As a former satellite guy, I appreciate that all is not lost. Still, the loss of those dB's is painful. But congratulations on getting something up there and getting at least a good chunk of the access you were expecting.

On the broken UHF uplink antenna, people are still able to communicate to the satellite. It is estimated that ~1.5 inches of the antenna exists in the base. Reports coming in say that the orientation of the satellite matter (which makes sense).